Creating Urgency in Sales – Landing Pages and Ads Optimization

Nowadays it is getting more and more complicated to activate conversions fast. People do research and investigate receiving insights from different sources of information before making a decision and a purchase. 

As conversion funnels get longer and more complex, how can we push people to take action now? How can we avoid them taking more time to think about it and reevaluate their options? 

In this article we’ll evaluate some practical examples on how to create a sense of urgency in sales for consumers, so they convert now, by optimizing our websites and our online advertising strategies. This way we won’t only generate a sense of urgency once they are navigating our site but also before that. In case you’re not advertising online yet, here’s how to quickstart in 5 minutes and for free for Google Ads Creator.

1. Generate sense of urgency with a countdown

You can create a countdown for many purposes: show users they have a limited time to finish a purchase or subscribe to an event, that a promotion or offer is only available during a specific period of time… 

Anyhow, this type of shopping incentives usually have very positive effects in terms of creating a sense of urgency for sales. That’s why you should use it every time you have the opportunity to.

In most advertising platforms, like Google Ads, you can program this type of countdowns for your ads easily. This way, your potential clients will have the information at their fingertips even before entering your site. 

 

 

2. Generate a sense of urgency through scarcity. 

Time limitations are not the only ones that work well to generate a sense of urgency in sales, but limiting the number of items available also do. 

People hate the feeling that they are missing something, this feeling is called FOMO (fear of missing out), and this anxiety intensifies the wish to buy before it’s too late. 

This way if you display in your website that there are only a specific number of items or tickets left, or that you can only apply a specific number of discounts to a product, that can help people take action now and don’t leave it for later… in case later it’s gone. 

 

 

Actually, you can combine this with a countdown. It works really well for events or seasonal promotions where there’s a deadline and also a limited time of items available for the consumer.

In terms of your ads, it’s super easy to include them in your ad titles and description. However, you should make sure to eliminate it from your ads once it no longer applies. If you create specific ads for this, it’s easier so you don’t get confused as you can program them specifically with a starting and ending date. I recommend you do that so you can also track your conversion results independently and compare its performance to the rest of your ads.

3. Time-limited offers and temporary deals

As I mentioned before, you can also play with limited offers for generating a sense of urgency. The fact that they can miss a promotion or deal that won’t be available later can push people to make a purchase now even if they don’t really need that product or service at the moment. 

Supermarkets are experts in this field for products that are bought regularly, such as food or clothing. However, this strategy also works good for ítems that require a deeper research for the user. 

For instance, when purchasing a new electronic device like a smartphone or a computer, people tend to extend this decision as they don’t want to buy the wrong one. Using an attractive offer, this reticence to buy the wrong product decreases significantly.

4. Use timing CTAs for creating a sense of urgency in sales

Call to actions have a performance increase when using timing words on them. “Sign up”, “buy”, “subscribe”, “register”, “download”, are all examples of CTAs that have a better performance when followed by “today” or “now”.

 

 

This is the most classic example, however there are many other approaches. If we combine it with the limited time offers the CTA can be “Offers ending soon”. 

5. Time-limited free access

If your product or service is not usually available for free, you can generate a sense of urgency offering it for free during an exclusive period of time. I don’t mean the free trials always available for new users but specific time-limited free access offers in punctual moments. 

 

 

To sum things up…

Any message that implicitly says “if you leave now, you’re missing out” will make an impact on potential customers’ minds. I encourage you to use not one but combine many of the methods we’ve reviewed in this article but also avoid being too aggressive. You’ll be amazed by the results this can have!